


However Long The Night

by muirgen_lys



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: Angst, Complicated Relationships, Enemies to Friends, Enemies to less antagonistic companions who are starting to understand each other, Gen, Hawke is a bastard, M/M, One Shot, hope is complicated, pre-fenders - Freeform, recruiting for the revolution, references to slavery, separation from Justice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2020-05-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:20:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24392698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/muirgen_lys/pseuds/muirgen_lys
Summary: Separated from Justice against his will and his companion of six years banished to the fade, Anders is done with Kirkwall, done with Hawke, done with the mage rebellion, done with everything. But Hawke is not his only friend in Kirkwall, and sometimes encouragement comes from unexpected places.
Relationships: Anders & Fenris (Dragon Age), Anders/Fenris (Dragon Age)
Comments: 20
Kudos: 101





	However Long The Night

“Mage.”

Anders looked up from the bag he was hastily tying together. “Fenris. What is it?”

“What are you doing?”

“Leaving. What does it look like?”

There was no answer he could give to that, so Fenris kept silent, simply looking around the darkened clinic. The mage swept a row of potions off a shelf and into his bag.

“You intend to up and disappear then. After all Hawke has done for you.”

Anders gave a wry grimace. “Hawke has nothing to complain about. He wanted Justice gone; Justice is gone. No reason for me to stick around for the aftermath.”

“And the refugees? What will they do?”

“Whatever they were doing before, probably,” said Anders. “Which was mostly dying, I expect, but it's still doing something, in a sense.”

The light-hearted tone was a shock to Fenris, sending a chill through his stomach. He had found Anders' naive idealism irritating, but he had always assumed it was inextricable from him, like his towering height and stupid, tattered, feathery coat. He could no more have imagined him without it than Isabela without her daggers, or Varric without his easy charm. 

Now apparently it was gone, and the man who had cursed them for bringing violence to his sanctum of healing and salvation was cracking jokes about leaving Kirkwall's refugees to die.

“And your cause?” 

He wondered what answer he was even looking for. Anders' cause had been a source of enough conflict between them over the years. He should have considered it to be for the best if the mage had abandoned it. But to care about it still would at least hint that the man he had known was still present in the one who now stood before him.

“What about it?” asked Anders. “You were against it from the start, as I recall.” His voice dropped in imitation of Fenris' bass rumble: " _Mages must be contained!_ ” 

He dropped the mimicry and waved a hand dismissively. “It's done. It was Justice's cause, not mine. He believed in it. I only wanted to.”

It should have been what Fenris wanted to hear: the end of a threat to the innocents in this city, himself included. But the words held no comfort for him, no satisfaction. Instead, as he watched the mage ransack his own clinic, he found a suffocating grief rising in his throat. 

He hadn't realised until that moment how much he had... _admired_ , the mage's efforts at reform, misguided though they were. He did not share Anders' optimism, his belief in a better world. But it had meant something to him that one _could_ believe it: that there was someone in the world who truly imagined that mages and non-mages could live side by side. 

“I suppose I should have known all that rhetoric about your people's suffering was a smokescreen,” he said. His voice was harsh and cruel and searingly sarcastic, and he regretted it immediately. It was beneath him to lash out like this, trying to hurt someone simply because they had disappointed him. At if some part of him hoped that if he could just make the man angry, things would go back to normal; that if he could cut him badly enough, he might catch a glimpse of the old Anders, a hint of the idealism he had somehow been careless enough to believe in. Not enough to believe it was right, but enough to believe it was real.

_I am a fool no less than him, it seems._

The mage clenched his jaw, and for a few seconds Fenris thought he would refuse to answer. Then he spoke, his voice hard-edged and quiet. “What do you want from me?” he demanded. He stared down at his bag of scraps, avoiding Fenris' gaze. “They're dying, Fenris. They're my people, and they're dying. Branded, beheaded, or just beaten down day after day until they do it to themselves.” 

He tied off the bag decisively, lifted the strap to his shoulder. “Justice thought we could fight it. He thought if we stood up, if we fought back, that we could win. Or at least that it was a fight worth losing. But you can't fight the Templars, Fenris. You can run from them, hide from them, but you can't fight them. Those poor bastards in the gallows are my people, and more of them die every day, and they're going to keep dying, and there's _nothing_ I can do about. All that's left for me is to be somewhere I don't have to look at it.”

If there was anguish lurking in his voice, nothing of it showed on his face. He turned to leave and Fenris blocked the door, barricading it closed with one arm, and pinned the mage with a withering stare. He still wasn't sure why he cared, but he knew, for reasons he didn't care to examine too closely, that he wasn't prepared to see Anders walk away. Not over this. “ _That_ is your justification?” He demanded. “That if you cannot win, at least you should not have to see the suffering you allow to happen?”

“Why not?” The question snapped like a breaking rope, and Anders' face warped into a smile that balanced on a knife-edge between euphoria and fury. “You all do it. Lock 'em up, and let them die where we don't have to see.” He snorted, and his eyes softened, his bitter humour returning. “What are you doing here, if not turning your back on what's happening in Tevinter?” 

That struck closer to home than Fenris liked, and he swallowed, having no answer. 

Anders didn't seem to notice. He shouldered his bag again, this time with more determination. “Hawke thought he could have the same happy helpful healer with a little less whining if he just got rid of Justice. Well surprise! I'm a selfish, independent bastard with no particular interest in hanging around a city that slaughters people like me for sport. Hawke put himself in this situation. If he wants healing, he can whistle for it.”

“Where will you go?”

That halted him, for a moment. He looked down at his hands and for an instant Fenris saw his facade crack, a haunted expression, threatening panic or tears, rising on his face and being forced down. “I don't know,” he said. “Antiva, maybe, or Rivain. They say there are places there where mages can pass unnoticed.”

“Not Tevinter?”

“I...no. Maybe once, before...” His eyes flicked to Fenris, and away, revealing the direction of his thoughts. 

_Before you knew what was done to me there. What would be expected of you._ He had thought, once, that Anders would do well in Tevinter. He had meant offence when he said so, but it had been the truth. The mage's arrogant certainty had seemed in keeping with the magisters Fenris had known, and there was no question but that his magical skill would have won him praise.

Now...the certainty had vanished with Anders' demon, and it seemed that even thus unencumbered, Anders still had no stomach for blood magic. Tevinter would eat him alive.

“You could stay here a few days, at least,” he heard himself saying. “This sudden departure is unwise. You have no plans, no preparations, little thought of where to go.” He could see the impact he was having: Anders' shoulders stooped a little further with each reminder. “What harm is there in taking a few days, to decide where you are going? You would be safer here than wherever you might stop next.”

The mage's lips thinned. “Hawke's protection means less than nothing now. He'll drop me like a hot coal the moment I challenge him, and I have no intention of following him anywhere after what he did.”

“Hawke is not the only one in this city who would protect you. Merrill is a formidable enemy, for all neither of us care much for her practices. And Varric and Isabela and I would all come to your defence. You are not alone, even without Hawke.”

Anders looked at him, his expression turning less grim, more thoughtful. “I'm surprised to hear you include yourself in that number.”

“You should not be. I have defended you before.”

“In battle, because Hawke asked it of you. But you've made it clear the only thing that stayed your hand from turning me over to be made Tranquil was Hawke.”

Fenris flushed. “I...may have overstated matters,” he said. Then after a moment, “Or, perhaps my thinking has changed.”

Anders snorted. “Andraste's knickerweasels, your thinking has changed! All it took was me giving up and deciding to move to Rivain. Why didn't I do this years ago?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No, I am not choosing to defend you because you are trying to run away. Again. Quite the reverse.”

He smiled mirthlessly. “I would have thought giving up on Justice's mad quest would positively endear me to you.”

“The fact that you believed in something was one of the few things I liked about you.”

“There's irony for you. You hated me for joining with Justice, and it turns out you actually liked him better than me all along.”

“I do not believe everything I liked about you came from him.”

“How optimistic of you.”

“I admired your compassion.” 

He hadn't meant to say that. This was a strange conversation, unexpectedly genuine, and he seemed unable to predict what was going to come out of his mouth next. He supposed it didn't matter what the mage knew now, if he was leaving. 

“Even when I despised you for falling prey to a demon, even when I thought it had been your undoing, I admired your compassion. You never hardened your heart against the refugees or the mages in the gallows, never closed yourself off to the suffering around you. I wished, sometimes, that I knew how to be so open-hearted.”

Anders hefted the bag again. “I'm fresh out of compassion.”

“No, you're not,” said Fenris softly. “If you were, you would not need to run. You're out of hope.”

That wiped the mage's smile away, and again, his false front wavered. “That makes two of us,” he said.

Fenris didn't object to the characterization. It was far from the first commonality he'd acknowledged between them, but one of very few he'd admitted without argument. He smiled bleakly. “Hope is not a sought-after quality in a slave,” he said. More quietly, “I am tired of being hopeless.”

“I'm not,” said Anders, sounding husky and scraped raw. “Justice had hope and you saw what it did to us. Burned us up to keep itself alive. I like a light in the dark as much as anyone, but this flame consumes you.”

“Then you share out the burden,” said Fenris. “Find others to hope with you. A torch burns until its fuel is gone, and leaves only ash where it stood. But walk through the forest after a forest fire. The ground is revived. The fog warriors believed such fires were necessary to bring a worn-out forest back to life.”

Anders was watching him head cocked to one side, brows furrowed. But there was a softness to the corners of his mouth that hadn't been there before. “You're an odd person to be giving lectures about hope, Fenris.”

Fenris shrugged, as if to say ' _yes, and?_ ' “Perhaps tomorrow I shall have recovered my senses,” he said. “You cannot know unless you stay to find out.”

“Alright,” said Anders. “A few days, at least.”

“Will you keep the clinic open?”

He looked around, shrugged. “It's something to do. A man has to occupy himself somehow.” His face darkened. “I meant it though, about Hawke. He and I are done.”

“I will keep him away from you. We all will.”

“I appreciate that.”

“Was that thanks I heard? From the mage of the perpetual victim complex? I may die of shock.”

“It wasn't, technically. Just a statement of appreciation.”

“Ah. That's all right then.”

Anders actually laughed briefly at that. “Thank you,” he said. “For the lecture as well as the assist with Hawke.” 

Fenris shrugged. “It is no trouble. Apparently I have more of the revolutionary in me than I imagined.”

“I still think this is daft, and I may run away to Rivain yet.”

“That is probably the wisest course.”

“But if I don't, maybe we can overthrow Tevinter sometime.”

Fenris laughed at that, a short, sharp, forceful sound, and tried to ignore the mix of emotions that churned in his chest at the suggestion. 

_The Imperium has stood a thousand years. It will never fall. Slave rebellions end only in dead slaves, and more needed to fill their shackles._

And then an answering voice, quieter, but rising insistently from deep in his bones: _But Andraste freed the south. Andraste and Shartan. And even in Tevinter, Magisters are only men, and die as easily as other men._

He shook his head, as if by doing so he could shake off the small whisper of hope hovering in his heart. “Good night, mage.”

“Good night, Fenris. See you in the morning.”


End file.
